Extraordinary mansions in the middle of nowhere.
No one has ever heard of Karaikudi or the Chettinar tribes. Even less the Nagarathar as they prefer to be called. I looked in Planet Earth and Lonely Planet guides after our last visit and neither of them mention the town or the wondrous gifts on offer. A few tour operators are catching on, but it remains well off the radar.
But before getting into the, some might find boring, history of how these marvellous curiosities got here, let me tell you what they are, and how the best place in the world to talk about them from is the lunch table at Meenakshi Meyyappan’s hotel, The Bangala.
This is our lunch table: the banana leaf and thirty percent of all the vegetables are grown in the kitchen garden behind the hotel. The watchful waiters sneak up on you with ladles of scrumptious, largely vegetarian dishes, which they dollop on your banana leaf. I counted ten different dishes for this lunch, the day before the selection had been completely different. At the end of the meal the banana leaf is folded up, put in a basket and fed to the cows. The ordure is then put back on the veg patch. Eco living in action. Meenakshi will have no plastic in the Bangala, and tells me that all the food save for celery and lettuce comes from within a 50km radius. The laundry bags in the room are made of old newspapers with string handles. The date on ours? June 2010.
But more about Meenakshi later. The reason to visit Karaikudi is to see the Chettinad palaces which litter this otherwise unimpressive landscape. We drive along narrow rutted tarmac, dodging buses, cows and tuk-tuks, to the first of several villages on our list. It is hot and dusty, the vista populated with the brilliant colours of Tamil women walking, working, carrying. There is never emptiness or solitude anywhere in this teeming country.
We slow as we see buildings emerge from this scrubby scenery like a sets from Game of Thrones. A great wall with latticed parapet, peers over the clawing vegetation. Others appear, immense, often decrepit and battle scarred, but somehow regal and proud in their resilience. We turn a corner around a great buttress of bruised stucco capped with angular balustrades, browning and crumbling back to the earth they came from. Now there is a grand entrance, tiered and porticoed, with an enticing colonnade behind a rusting lattice gate, with the glimpse of a pan tiled roof. Suli stops the car and we clamber out into a wall of afternoon heat and the smell of animals. A goat scampers away from under a bush. All eyes are on the absurd buildings before us.
And so our tour progresses. We are told that there are several hundred houses scattered across the 75 villages of the six tribes, with a population of maybe 120,000, but no one has done a proper survey. Some are monumental, others more domestic, but all have an impertinent grandeur. Sadly, most are unloved and deserted, a few are in ruins.
We can explore three mansions in different villages and the extent of the lavish décor becomes apparent: teak pillars, granite columns, ebony panels, carved ceilings. Glazed tiles everywhere. Venetian lamp glasses, faience, brilliant decorative brass work; a melange of decorative exuberance, sometimes OTT but stylistically coherent and not without charm.
These houses truly amaze, but it is only a tiny number that we can enter, most are closed and deserted, owned by the diaspora, often with uncertain title or many names on the deeds, unloved and destined to remain so. They are monuments to something – but what? What are they doing here in this unremarkable scrubland fifty miles from the sea, their extravagance and scale totally incongruous with the setting and vernacular of the locale?
The Chettiar tribe claim their origin from an area on the coast just south of Pondicherry. I am still not sure whether originally they represented a single clan or a rather a local population, but they did two things; they became very successful traders for the Chola kingdom and they forged a group identity. The start of this entrepreneurship was the 10th to 12th centuries when Chola sea power across the Bay of Bengal extended over the Andaman Sea to what we would now call the Far East. Trade boomed extending from teak and commodities from Burma, to gold and precious stones. As the Chola dynasty waned so they forged new relationships with the Pandyas, accepting an invitation to move to their current location around Karaikudi.
The beginning of the modern Chettiar story goes back to that migration to Pandya Nadu, a parched land of hard baked soil where only scrubby trees and thorn bushes flourish. They continued as traders of first rice and cotton, but then the famed cottons from the south, along with diamonds pearls and precious stones. What seems to be an innate financial acumen combined with an ethical stance and rare judgment, not only brought financial success but also attracted the notice of the East India Company who could see their role as middlemen between the imperial banks and the small farmer and traders. They moved into Calcutta, Ceylon and then Burma, the Malay States and even South Africa. And all the time the talk was of ‘the Chettiars’, not a single family like the Rothschilds, or a company, but a group of tribal people.
By the early 19th century, they were stepping into their heyday. Over the next 150 years – until the second war – everything seemed to flourish: trade, banking, lending, entrepreneurship, and one would also suspect, some dodgy dealing, but they managed to foster relationships, still somehow acting en masse. Of course during this time, they amassed huge wealth, and then, commencing in the mid 19th Century, came the house building, which until the 1920s, saw the creation of these magnificent buildings, with all the flashy embellishments money could buy. There must have been elements of keeping up with the Pattayams. You have stone pillars in your hall, I will get teak. You have thin teak, I will get fatter teak. You find tiles from France, I will get mine from Italy. But I still don’t quite get how they seemed to all be successful. Why didn’t one family come to dominate?
And then post-war it all started to slip away. Nationalism replaced the opportunities of imperial power. The various countries where the Chettiar businesses were based became independent states and businesses were forced to close or move. Some of the wealth in stones and gold was squirrelled away, but most of the families migrated to look for opportunities in the States, the UK, Australia or Singapore. The houses were locked up, many were demolished, with the precious fixtures and fittings ending up being sold for a song in the antique markets of Kochin and elsewhere. There was no one to tell the story of the Chettiars or their magnificent mansions . . . until Meenakshi Meyyappan.
Meenakshi is a bit lame now, but at 83 she is still needle sharp and keeps an eagle eye on the daily running of The Bangala, the hotel she created from what was a gentleman’s club, owned by her family in the centre of Karaikudi.
In parallel with her creating a charming place to stay and developing a quite exceptional and unique cuisine, she has subtly reintroduced the world to the heritage of the Chettiars. She has allowed guests to visit her home and persuaded other owners to follow suit. She has supported traditional crafts such as weaving and tile making, written books and encouraged others to do the same. She has collected old photographs, depicting the unique traditions of the families from the earlier part of the last century, and collected domestic items used in Chettiar homes. She is the embodiment of the successful Chettiar. An audience with her is akin to meeting Queen Victoria. She sits regal and composed, swathed in a sari with a retinue of attendants who are summoned to bring new fabrics she is having woven, a new book she is publishing with a young photographer, or chai and some cake. She insists on Carolyn's email address so they can share recipes! She is a true force of nature.
Staying at the Bangala today is a joy. The spacious rooms are filled with antiques and artwork of taste and quality. The staff are adorable, the pool delicious and welcoming. The library is stocked with interesting volumes on things Indian and beyond, it is an oasis of cool calm in a bustling town. But it must be the food that is the high point. Every meal is a tasting menu of fresh veggie food with a morsel of chicken or mutton now and again. One finds one is eating unfamiliar vegetables in unusual combinations, often mildly spiced but occasionally with a chilli bite. The breads, southern Indian appams, dosas and vadai are to die for.
Michael the friendly night porter, went to the station for us to change our overnight rail ticket to Chennai when we realised the train was calling at Karaikudi. He then accompanied us to the station and made sure we were waiting in the right place for our AC carriage. Sitting chatting while we awaited the train, reveals his deep faith and devotion. He visits church every day, plays the piano or organ for services, coaches the choir and does good charitable deeds. He is the perfect Hindu, except that he is a Catholic. What is it about this part of the world that imbues such deep religiosity amongst its population? Will it fade with the trappings of western values? It didn't seem to for the Chettinar, who continued to support their temples and did great charitable work, but they were living in a very different age.
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